HP Envy 4520 All-in-One Printer Review

Table of Contents

Introduction, Design & Features

In HP's 2015 lineup of Envy all-in-one printers (in this case, they are print-, copy-, and scan-capable models), you’ve got some very cheap printers—no other way of saying it.

Only one other Envy model, the Envy 4500 e-All-in-One Printer, is shorter on features and less expensive than the unit we’re reviewing here today: the $99.99-list Envy 4520 All-in-One Printer. In fact, as we wrote this in late October 2015, HP was selling the Envy 4500 for a mere $49.99—mind-bogglingly low for a full-blown multifunction printer. The Envy 4520, on the other hand (most likely because it’s so new), sold everywhere we checked for its full $99.99 MSRP. Still, that's very inexpensive for a photo and document printer that can do all it does.

Like the HP Envy 5540 we reviewed a week or so before this model, the HP Envy 4520 was part of a new six-printer lineup HP released midyear. Ranging in list price from $79 to $299, the six new models comprise two Envy personal or family all-in-ones (AIOs) and four home- or small-office OfficeJet AIOs. (As we noted in our review of the Envy 5540, over the course of the next month or two we’ll look at most or all of them.) They all have one thing in common, though: support for a program HP calls “Instant Ink,” in which you pay a flat subscription fee to print a certain number of pages per month. To make that possible, HP sends you the necessary ink cartridges in the mail as you run low, automatically.

Instant Ink-compatible printers like these six new ones come ready to take part in the program right out of the box. Even so, most of HP’s recent, Internet-connectible consumer- and business-grade printers support or are eligible for, Instant Ink. (That includes some high-volume models, such as the popular OfficeJet Pro 8630 e-All-in-One Printer we looked at back in early 2014.)

The real-world distinction here is that signing up for Instant Ink is much easier with the printers that come Instant Ink-ready, as opposed to those that require you to register the machine with the service on your own. In fact, we found registering an Instant Ink-supported OfficeJet Pro 8620 a much more involved process that eventually led to a short session with HP’s Instant Ink support team. The good news is that the technician was knowledgeable and knew exactly how to help us.

Like its similarly priced sibling, the Envy 5540, the Envy 4520 is small, prints somewhat sluggishly versus competitors, and lacks an automatic document feeder (ADF) for copying and scanning multipage documents. (You have to flip them over manually to copy or scan the other side.)

In other words, this isn’t a workhorse AIO by a long shot, and it’s missing some important convenience and productivity features you might expect on a slightly more expensive AIO. At the same time, unless you need multipage scanning and high-speed volume printing and copying on a semi-regular basis, the Envy 4520 isn’t a bad little entry-level printer.

Design & Features

There are notable differences between its $50 little brother, the Envy 4500, and this Envy—right down to the two very distinct chassis styles, as shown here…

That’s our Envy 4520 there on the left. In a way, it is more high-tech- and stylish-looking than the boxy Envy 4500 at right. In any case, the newer model is more in keeping with the most current Envy AIO style, while the earlier model looks more like the HP Envy models of a few years ago.

In any case, at 17.5 inches across, 14.5 inches from front to back, a mere 5 inches high, and a slight 11.9 pounds, this is most certainly a desktop printer, and its support for Wi-Fi means that you can put it just about anywhere—even in the garage or on another floor of the house. A 2.2-inch monochrome LCD (optimistically dubbed “Hi-Res” by HP) provides the only (100 percent digital) physical controls, apart from the on/off button.

In addition to Wi-Fi connectivity, the Envy 4520 also supports a direct-wired USB connection to a single PC. However, we should point out that for any of the somewhat standard mobile-connectivity options to work, such as cloud connectivity or Apple AirPrint, you’ll need the printer connected directly to the Internet, which you can’t, in this case, achieve over USB.

You can, however, also connect your mobile device to this AIO via Wireless Direct. That is HP’s equivalent of Wi-Fi Direct, a protocol for connecting your smartphone, tablet, or laptop to your printer without either device being connected to an intermediary network or router. You also get support for many of the traditional mobile-connectivity options, among them the above-mentioned Apple AirPrint, Google’s Cloud Print, and Android-device direct printing via the MOPRIA spec. With the help of these options, printing is possible from devices running Android, iOS, BlackBerry, Windows 8, Windows 10, Windows RT, and Windows 10 Mobile.

More conventional printing from and scanning to a PC is easy enough, as well. And with the control panel, you can regulate walk-up, or PC-free, tasks, as well as manage and use any of HP’s stock "printables" that you can get from its Net-connected printer apps. These include professionally designed forms, prefab contracts, puzzles and games for the children—handy, and also encouragement to use more ink! We’ve discussed HP’s printer apps many times in our reviews of HP printers and AIOs over recent years, as far back as our review of the OfficeJet 4630 at the end of 2012. Meanwhile, the list of sites and supported content continues to grow.

Missing on this little printer, but available on a couple of higher-end, costlier Envy models (such as the Envy 5660 and 7640), is a dedicated USB port for connecting USB thumb drives or other external storage for direct printing. Instead, these types of tasks (such as printing from or scanning to a flash drive or a cloud site) must be accomplished from your PC. The Envy 4520 also lacks an SD-card slot for straight-from-the-card photo prints.

As we said about the Envy 5540, aside from the lack of an ADF or USB/memory card support, this Envy’s feature set isn’t half-bad for the price. As we pointed out about the larger model, though, the steps upward between these various products aren’t very large in terms of cost. In other words, piling on the convenience and productivity features isn’t all that expensive an proposition, in this case. And no matter which Envy model you buy, so far every one we’ve looked at has churned out good-looking photos.

Even better news, as we'll get into in the next section, is that with Instant Ink it churns out those photos at a very low cost per page.

Table of Contents

HP Envy 4520 All-in-One Printer

Our Verdict:
This entry-level inkjet delivers sharp, well-defined output—and, with an Instant Ink subscription, does so inexpensively. It’s a handy little AIO for modest printing needs if you can tolerate the sluggish print speeds.

TERMS OF USE

ComputerShopper may earn affiliate commissions from shopping links included on this page. To find out more, read our complete Terms of Service.